DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 2000, 20, 331-369. Books as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages MONICA H. GREEN (*) SUMMARY 1.—Professional female practitioners and their books. 2.—Religious women and their books. 3.—Conclusions and speculations: the role of gender. ABSTRACT The development of philosophical medicine in the high and late Middle Ages brought with it a powerful association of medical knowledge with the written word. To possess books, or at least to have access to books, was both a prerequisite for and a symbol of the kind of theoretical learning that distinguished the learned practitioner from the empiric. This study examines evidence for women’s access to medical books, raising the question of what difference gender made. I argue that, for the most part, women did not own medical books, whether they were laywomen or religious. I suggest that this was largely due to the limits on advanced education for women, a factor that would have effected both laywomen and nuns. BIBLID [0211-9536(2000) 20; 331-369] Fecha de aceptación: 23 de noviembre de 1999 (*) Associate Professor. Department of History. 226 Carr Building, Duke University. Durham, NC 27708-0719. USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Books as a Source of Medical Educationfor Women in the Middle Ages
MONICA H. GREEN (*)
SUMMARY
1.—Professional female practitioners and their books. 2.—Religious women andtheir books. 3.—Conclusions and speculations: the role of gender.
ABSTRACT
The development of philosophical medicine in the high and late Middle Agesbrought with it a powerful association of medical knowledge with the written word. Topossess books, or at least to have access to books, was both a prerequisite for and asymbol of the kind of theoretical learning that distinguished the learned practitionerfrom the empiric. This study examines evidence for women’s access to medical books,raising the question of what difference gender made. I argue that, for the most part,women did not own medical books, whether they were laywomen or religious. I suggestthat this was largely due to the limits on advanced education for women, a factor thatwould have effected both laywomen and nuns.
BIBLID [0211-9536(2000) 20; 331-369]Fecha de aceptación: 23 de noviembre de 1999
(*) Associate Professor. Department of History. 226 Carr Building, Duke University.Durham, NC 27708-0719. USA. E-mail: [email protected]
A few legendary accounts notwithstanding, it is well known thatwomen were excluded from the newly-founded universities of high andlater medieval Europe (1). Had medical education been provided exclusivelywithin the bounds of university culture, then we could readily assumewomen’s complete exclusion from the scientific (philosophical) medi-cine being developed and taught by university masters. But as historiansof medicine (especially those who study medieval vernacular traditions)are increasingly showing, formal medical knowledge was by no meansstrictly bound within the confines of the universities even if it was, ofnecessity, very intimately linked with the written word. In this essay, Iwould like to explore the degree to which medical books may havefunctioned as an alternate source of medical education to women who,because of their sex, could not move within the same social and intellectualcircles as men.
I have examined the role of books in the education of laywomen inanother context (2). Here I wish to gather together evidence for thepossession or use of written medical texts by professional femalepractitioners, on the one hand, and cloistered communities of womenon the other. The inclusion of female practitioners needs no explanation,though perhaps the inclusion of nuns does. The very fact of enclosurecreated communities that were almost entirely female and that wereexpected to strive for some level of self-sufficiency (3). Since, moreover,these communities generally had higher levels of female literacy thanthe rest of the populace, they might be a prime locus for engagement
(1) See, for example, SHANK, Michael. A Female University Student in Late Medie-val Kraków. Signs, 1986-87, 12, 373-80.
(2) GREEN, Monica H. The Possibilities of Literacy and the Limits of Reading:Women and the Gendering of Medical Literacy in Later Medieval Europe. In:Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Aldershot, Ashgate,2000, Essay VII.
(3) Since women could not perform priestly functions (including confession and theadministration of the Eucharist), women’s communities always required at leastthe occasional presence of male clerics. On the question of the presence of othermales in these houses, see below. I omit from this discussion hospitals andhospices, since they are less likely to be single-sex either in their clientele or theiradministration.
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with medical literature. The evidence I have gathered relates primarilyto the High and later Middle Ages (twelfth through early sixteenthcenturies), which is precisely the same period, as more and more scholarsare documenting, that saw a striking upsurge in the levels of femaleliteracy. Nevertheless, women seem to have stayed largely on the marginsof literate medical culture. This essay is an initial attempt to explainwhy.
1. PROFESSIONAL FEMALE PRACTITIONERS AND THEIR BOOKS
There is no question that throughout medieval Europe womenpractised as medical professionals (by which I mean simply that theyearned some kind of living off their medical practices or were acknowledgedas healers by their communities) (4). How many of these female surgeons,apothecaries, and other practitioners were literate, however, and howmany used medical texts in their education or practice is unclear. TheJewish physician Mayrona in the small French town of Manosque in theearly fourteenth century may well have been literate, given the needs ofher alternate profession of money-lender (5). Likewise, it would bereasonable to assume that the medica Euphemia (d. 1257), abbess ofWherell, was literate, probably even in Latin (6). More often, however,our evidence is ambiguous. In early fifteenth-century Paris, Phelipe LaChomete was deemed to be «ingenious and inclined to do medicine»and so she was «put in a place to learn it and there she became very
(4) GREEN, Monica H. Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in MedievalEurope. In: Judith Bennett et al. (eds.), Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages,Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 39-78; GREEN, Monica H.Documenting Medieval Women’s Medical Practice. In: Luis García-Ballester et al.(eds.), Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994, pp. 322-352. Both essays are reprinted in GREEN, note 2,as Essay I and Essay II, respectively.
(5) SHATZMILLER, Joseph. Médecine et justice en Provence médiévale: Documents deManosque, 1262-1348, Aix-en-Provence, Publications de l’Université de Provence,1989, p. 6.
(6) KEALEY, Edward J. England’s Earliest Women Doctors. Journal of the History ofMedicine and the Allied Sciences, 1985, 40, 473-477.
experienced»; whether this training involved book learning we do notknow (7). Six of twenty-three licensed women surgeons practising in thesouthern Italian kingdom of Naples are explicitly referred to as ydiota inthe documents, reflecting their inability to read Latin if not the vernacularas well (8). None of the other seventeen is explicitly called litterata, norare there any references to their ownership or use of books. In herfamous trial in Paris in 1322, the healer Jacoba Felicie insists that sheis indeed learned in medical theory and not one of those «illiteratesand empty-headed ignoramuses» (ydiotas et fatuos ignaros) to whom medicalpractice is legitimately forbidden. Her accusers, the physicians, likewisetie literacy to proper knowledge of medicine but they throw this back atJacoba as an accusation: she is, according to them, «totally ignorant ofthe art of medicine and illiterate» (totaliter est ignara artis medicine et nonlitterata) (9). While it may be that Jacoba and the university physiciansare arguing at cross-purposes —she understanding ydiota as «completelyilliterate,» they understanding illiterata as «not literate in Latin»—thefact remains that at no point in the trial does Jacoba explicitly claimthat she has learned her medicine from books or that she owns any.
Even ownership of a medical book might not guarantee ability touse it. In 1410, again in Paris, Perretta Petonne was prosecuted by themaster surgeons for unlicensed practice. She brought before the courta French book «full of excellent remedies.» According to the physicianswho examined her for her medical competence, she «didn’t know an Afrom a bundle of sticks»; she was, in other words, completely illiterate.Perretta, in response, insisted that she did know the contents of her
(7) THOMPSON, Guy Llewelyn. Paris and its People Under English Rule: The Anglo-Burgundian Regime 1420-1436, Oxford Historical Monographs, Oxford, Clarendon,1991, p. 153, n. 19.
(8) CALVANICO, Raffaele. Fonti per la storia della medicina e della chirurgia per il regnodi Napoli nel periodo angioino (a. 1273-1410), Naples, L’Arte Tipografica, 1962,items 1413, 1451 and 1872, 3071 (cf. 3195), 3226, 3598, and 3643.
(9) DENIFLE, Henri (ed.). Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis, Paris, Delalain, 1891-1899; repr. Brussels, Culture et Civilisation, 1964, vol. 2, pp. 255-267. See alsoCABRÉ I PAIRET, Montserrat; SALMÓN MUÑIZ, Fernando. Poder académicoversus autoridad femenina: La Facultad de Medicina de París contra JacobaFélicié (1322). Dynamis, 1999, 19, 55-78.
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book; the reason she was not able to read it at the time of the examinationwas that the physicians «kept turning and re- turning the pages in frontof her, all the while interrogating her together out of order» (10).
Obviously, in the absence of any clear signals such as the designationydiota (and even then, as the case of Perretta Petonne shows, an assertionof illiteracy may be rhetorical, part of a larger political agenda) (11), wecannot assume that all these female practitioners were illiterate. Butneither can we assume that they were literate. We cannot assume thatliteracy necessarily played the same role in the development of femalepractitioners as it did for males who functioned within or on the marginsof university culture. Moreover, even when female practitioners wereliterate, it is not always clear that that literacy was directed toward theirmedical pursuits. We know, for example, both that Elizabeth, LadyZouche (d. 1380/81) was a book-owner and that she practised medicine(the Dominican friar Henry Daniel praises her as «the best healer inEngland among women»), yet there is nothing in her will to confirmthat she owned medical books (12).
(10) DUMAS, Geneviève. Les femmes et les pratiques de la santé‚ dans le «Registredes plaidoiries du Parlement de Paris», 1364-1427. Canadian Bulletin of MedicalHistory/Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la medecine, 1996, 13, 3-27, quotation on p. 22.
(11) On this larger rhetorical context, see AGRIMI, Jole; CRISCIANI, Chiara. Immaginie ruoli della ‘vetula’ tra sapere medico e antropologia religiosa (secoli XIII-XV).In: Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and André Vauchez (eds.), Poteri carismatici einformali: chiesa e societa medioevali, Palermo, Sellerio Editore, 1992, pp. 224-261.French trans.: Savoir médical et anthropologie religieuse: Les représentations etles fonctions de la vetula (XIIIe-XVe siècle). Annales: E.S.C., 1993, 48, 1281-1308.
(12) In her will, Elizabeth mentions two books, both Arthurian texts, which she leavesto her husband, plus a portiforium, a psalter, «and other books» which she givesto Henry Hudde, her chaplain. GIBBONS, Alfred. Early Lincoln Wills: An Abstractof all the Wills and Administrations Recorded in the Episcopal Registers of the Old Dioceseof Lincoln... 1280-1547, Lincoln, James Williamson, 1888, pp. 91-92. Even if weimagine that medical books might have been among those «other books,» we areleft with the question of why she doesn’t give them to her daughters or to someother woman. Daniel’s assessment of her— «the best God’s leech of Brightlandin women» (cited in HARVEY, John. Medieval Gardens, rev. ed., London, GardenSociety, 1990, p. 130)—is significant. Even if it is unclear whether he saying thatshe is the best woman physician or the best physician of women (i.e., gynecologist),either way he implies that her knowledge was gender-specific. We might expect,
Another example of a medical practitioner who owned a booksuggests how indirect the association between written medical knowledgeand functional duties of medical practice might be. In 1398, the Frenchqueen dowager, Blanche of Navarre, willed to Symmonete, a servant inher household, one of her two books of «surgery». This 1398 codicil toher will was in fact the second time Blanche had stated her wishes forthe dispersal of her property. Earlier, in 1396, she had identified Symmoneteas a woman qui sert les malades («who attends to the sick»); at that timeBlanche willed her 60 francs and «one of our short robes.» In 1398,however, after Blanche had suffered a severe illness, we find Symmoneteidentified as Blanche’s chambermaid. And it is only now, now that thiswoman has become an intimate of Blanche (and, no doubt, proved hertherapeutic skill to good effect) that Blanche thinks to give her amedical book (13). In this case, ownership of a medical book followsmedical practice; it is not a propaedeutic to it.
Women’s tenuous association with literate medicine also seems tobe reflected in the paucity of female medical writers in medieval Europe.Beyond the rightly famous twelfth-century figures Trota of Salerno andHildegard of Bingen (14), women usually appear only in male-authoredwritings as the sources of individual remedies: the so-called mulieresSalernitanae are many times credited with unique herbal practices inworks coming out of the twelfth-century medical Mecca, Salerno (15); acertain «woman of Tesingen» is credited with a small collection of
therefore, that were her precepts written down, they would be passed on directlyto another woman.
(13) DELISLE, Léopold. Testament de Blanche de Navarre, Reine de France. Mémoiresde la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France, 1886, 12, 1-64, items 312 and427. Since Blanche mentions this same book in her will of 1396, it is clear thatit is not a recent acquisition.
(14) For bibliography on these two figures, see GREEN, Monica H. In Search of an«Authentic» Women’s Medicine: The Strange Fates of Trota of Salerno andHildegard of Bingen. Dynamis, 1999, 19, 25-54. Montserrat Cabré has recentlydiscovered a work on pulses said to have been composed by a Saracen woman(Erfurt, Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek, MS Amplonian Q 320, ff. 187v-189v); mythanks to Dr Cabré for this information.
(15) I am preparing a study on the mulieres Salernitanae where I collect all the pertinentevidence.
337Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
recipes for ear disorders in a late thirteenth-century Germanmanuscript (16); a gratia dei (a salve for wounds) is attributed to LadyBeauchamp, wife of the earl of Warwick (17); a self-treatment for dropsyis credited to an unnamed woman in London (18); a recipe for «wark»(?) on a woman’s back is ascribed to «Clawdius the wif de Cottyngham»while another recipe is said to have been «per B wif proved» (19).Count Palatine Ludwig V frequently cited the remedies of five womenhealers in his massive twelve-volume medical compendium composed inHeidelberg in the early sixteenth century (20), as did Anton Trutmannin his own medical compendium produced a few years earlier in southwestGermany (21). Such woman-authored treatments (which will no doubt
(16) KEIL, Gundolf. Frau von Tesingen. In: Kurt Ruh (ed.), Die deutschen Literatur desMittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed., in progress, Berlin/New York, Walter deGruyter, 1978, vol. 9, p. 717.
(17) It is unclear which countess is being referred to. For the text, see HEINRICH,Fritz (ed.). Ein mittelenglisches Medizinbuch, Halle, Max Niemeyer, 1896, pp. 187-89; my thanks to George Keiser for this reference. In addition to the manuscriptslisted by Heinrich, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 29, f. 32v, has a veracomposicio domine Beauchamp.
(18) ROWLAND, Beryl (ed.). Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health: The First English GynecologicalHandbook, Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Press, 1981, pp. 110-112.
(19) Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.14.52; see MOONEY, Linne R. The Index ofMiddle English Prose. Handlist XI: Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College,Cambridge, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1995, p. 63. In some cases, however, thewoman mentioned may be the patient, not the inventor of the remedy. A remedy«proued by a lady of yorke» cited in a Middle English gynaecological text(Cambridge, University Library, MS Ii.VI.33, f. 24r-v) was taught to her by amale physician.
(20) See Gundolf Keil’s article on Ludwig in RUH et al., note 16 , vol. 5, pp. 1016-1030, at col. 1025. At least two of these women appear quite extensively: DebraStoudt counts approximately 400 entries for Anna Gremsin and more than 900for Regina Hurleweg; Hurleweg, at least, seems to have authored a text and giventhe corpus of her remedies, this seems likely for Gremsin as well. See STOUDT,Debra L. Medieval German Women and the Power of Healing. In: Lilian R. Furst(ed.), Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill, Lexington, University ofKentucky Press, 1997, pp. 13-42, at p. 15.
(21) KEIL, Gundolf. Der Hausvater als Arzt. In: Trude Ehlert, et al. (eds.), Haushaltund Familie in Mittelalter und fruher Neuzeit, Sigmaringen, Jan Thorbecke, 1991, pp.219-243, at p. 238.
continue to be discovered) prove that female practitioners were frequentlycredited for their medicinal preparations. It is unclear, however, howoften they themselves collected them in writing and put them intopublic circulation. Obviously, the majority of male practitioners neverauthored medical texts either, but for those male practitioners who hadthe benefit of not only basic literacy but also formal training in the artsof composition (ars dictaminis), the production of formal written recordsof their theories and practices was at least a possibility (22).
The situation for midwives is more ambiguous. In Europe generally,literacy and book ownership are no better documented for midwivesthan for other female practitioners. Midwives are not normally depictedwith books (23), nor does the archdeacon Jean Mouchard seem concernedto determine midwives’ literacy when he surveys the various parishes inthe suburbs of Paris in the mid- fifteenth century asking Quis est obstetrix(«Who is the midwife»)? (24) Thomas de Cantimpré, writing in the
(22) JACQUART, Danielle. Le milieu médical en France du XIIe au XVe siècle: En annexe2e supplément au «Dictionnaire» d’Ernest Wickersheimer, Geneva, Librairie Droz, 1981,pp. 199-205. Jacquart identifies some 67 French male authors of medical writingswho seem to have had no university training.
(23) In surveying all twelfth- through fourteenth-century depictions of midwives inwestern illuminated manuscripts in the Index of Christian Art (nearly 200 differentimages), I found only one instance of a midwife holding or situated near writtenmaterial: Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, germ. oct. 109, f. 69v, where one of the twomidwives Salome and Rachel is holding a descriptive scroll. My thanks to the staffof the Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks for allowing me toconsult their copy of the Index.
(24) MOUCHARD, Jean. Visites archidiaconales de Josas, Paris, A. Picard, 1902; see alsoSAUNIER, Annie. Le visiteur, les femmes et les ‘obstetrices’ des paroisses del’archidiaconé de Josas de 1458 à 1470. In: Santé, médecine et assistance au moyenâge, Actes du 110e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes, Montpellier, 1985, Sectiond’histoire médiévale et de philologie, 2 vols., Paris, Editions du C.T.H.S., 1987,vol. 1, pp. 43-62. Mouchard mentions midwives’ «letters,» but these are letterscertifying that they have taken an oath before the bishop; there is nothing in hisaccounts to indicate that they could (or were expected to) read the lettersthemselves. For further information on ecclesiastical involvement in the appointmentof midwives, see TAGLIA, Kathryn. Delivering a Christian Identity: Midwives inNorthern French Synodal Legislation, c. 1200-1500, forthcoming in a collectionof essays on medicine and religion edited by Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler.
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thirteenth century, provides obstetrical instructions to priests so thatthey may take «the more discerning» midwives aside and instruct themorally on how to deliver babies. Thomas’s brief instructions were excerptedand circulated in other contexts, but it is unlikely that midwives werethe direct reading audience (25). The French, English, and Dutchgynaecological and obstetrical texts of the thirteenth through fifteenthcenturies that were addressed to female audiences were directed tolaywomen in general, not midwives (26).
The situation was somewhat different in central Europe. The LowCountries and Germany moved more quickly than other parts of Europetoward developing a regulated corps of midwives with specified professionalduties and competencies. Literacy certainly would have been of benefitto them, if only for reading the oaths they were expected to swear andthe ordinances they were expected to follow. An ordinance for midwivesin the countryside surrounding Nuremberg actually specifies that «amidwife should diligently read the books pertaining to her profession,and in the summer she should attend the Wednesday lectures given bythe instructor in Nuremberg» (27). Georg Burckhard, who published
(25) CANTIMPRÉ, Thomas de. Liber de natura rerum, H. Boese (ed.), Berlin/New York,Walter de Gruyter, 1973, vol. 1, Book 1, cap. 76, p. 76. On the circulation of thisexcerpt in French and Dutch texts, see GREEN, Monica H. Traittié tout demençonges: The Secrés des dames, Trotula, and Attitudes Towards Women’s Medi-cine in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century France. In: Marilynn Desmond(ed.), Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference, Minneapolis, University ofMinnesota Press, 1998, pp. 146-178, at pp. 151, 172 n. 15, and 173 n. 30. G. H.Russell offers the intriguing argument that certain texts meant for parish priestsincluded brief imbedded vernacular texts meant to be taught to the parishionerfor memorization; see RUSSELL, G. H. Vernacular Instruction of the Laity: TheLater Middle Ages in England. Some Notes and Texts. Journal of Religious History,1962, 2, 98-119. Such a scenario might explain why the French and Dutchversions of the Cantimpré excerpt are couched in direct second-person addressto pregnant women and midwives.
(26) See GREEN, Monica H. A Handlist of the Latin and Vernacular Manuscripts ofthe So-Called Trotula Texts. Part II: The Vernacular Texts and Latin Re-Writings.Scriptorium, 1997, 51, 80-104.
(27) BURCKHARD, Georg. Die deutschen Hebammenordnungen von ihren ersten Anfängenbis auf die Neuzeit, Leipzig, W. Engelmann, 1912, p. 109. Why these stipulationsfor reading are not repeated in the ordinance for midwives in Nuremberg proper
this undated document, attributes it to the late fifteenth century, thefirst moment at which we have evidence for any «professional books» inGerman dealing solely with the obstetrical art. It is important to note,however, that while the development of professional controls on midwiferyseems to have prompted this concern about their technical reading, thetwo known German books on obstetrics from this period, the Frauenbüchleinand the Rosengarten, are in fact directed as much to pregnant womenand the so-called ehrbare Frauen («upright, honorable women») whosupervised midwives as to the midwives themselves (28). Indeed, in theironly known manuscript versions, the texts are not addressed to midwivesat all. Nor did a description of the duties of the midwife coming fromWürttemberg around 1480 say anything that hinted at midwives’ expectedliteracy; on the contrary, the ordinatio is written in Latin and seems tolay out practices and responsibilities that will be dictated to the midwifeby a physician or latinate overseer (29). With increasing regulation,German midwives were more and more circumscribed into a narrowrealm of practice, often being prohibited from performing any surgicalmanoeuvres or prescribing medicines (30). Although the Frauenbüchlein
is unclear to me. A Heilbronn ordinance, probably from the same period, saysmuch the same thing (ibid., p. 124), and the injunction to own and read midwiferytexts became common in the sixteenth century.
(28) MARCH-LONG, Caroline G. Early Modern German Obstetrical Manuals: DasFrauenbüchlein (c. 1495) and Der Rosengarten (1513). M.A. thesis, Department ofGermanic Languages and Literature, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina,1993.
(29) PFEILSTICKER, Walther. Eine württembergische Hebammenordnung von ca. 1480.Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 1920, 20, 95-98. Unlike almost all oaths from thefifteenth or sixteenth century, this ordinatio is extremely specific on therapeuticmatters (including caesarean section). It begins by stating that midwives will take anoath four or at least two times a year promising correct care of the parturient.
(30) Notably, material on general gynaecology is almost totally lacking from theFrauenbüchlein and the Rosengarten aside from the listing of postpartum symptomswhich should prompt the midwife or the woman herself to call a physician. Onother German gynaecological texts from this period (most of which seem to bedirected at male audiences), see KRUSE, Britta-Juliane. Verborgene Heilkünste:Geschichte der Frauenmedizin im Spätmittelalter, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter [Quellenund Forschungen zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, 5], 1996; and my reviewof it, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1997, 71, 333-335.
341Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
and the Rosengarten no doubt served as important sources for the edificationof midwives, therefore, the fact that they were directed at several sectorsof the general female populace suggests that rather than furthering theintegration of midwives into the medical professions (which of coursedepended on esoteric knowledge as their stock in trade), these «professionalbooks» kept midwives confined to the realm of the birthing roomwhere, because of social custom, men were not normally permitted.
2. RELIGIOUS WOMEN AND THEIR BOOKS
Most enclosed religious foundations for women made, at least intheory, some kind of provision for medical care (31). St Augustine,writing to a group of nuns in Hippo (in modern-day Tunisia) in the latefourth or early fifth century, urged them to consult male physicianswhen necessary (32). In the High Middle Ages, there seems to have
(31) The medical provisions in medieval nunneries have never been thoroughly studied.They are only sketchily addressed by POWER, Eileen. Medieval English Nunneriesc. 1275 to 1535, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1922, pp. 134, 258-260,316, 322, and 649; FLEMMING, Percy. The Medical Aspects of the MediaevalMonastery in England. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1928-1929, 22,771-782; and COLDICOTT, Diana. Hampshire Nunneries, Sussex, Phillimore, 1989,pp. 94-95. The several recent studies on the architecture of nunneries either donot mention the infirmary or make only passing reference to its existence: specialissue of Gesta (Monastic Architecture for Women), 1992, 31 (no. 2), 73-134; andGILCHRIST, Roberta. Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of ReligiousWomen, London & New York, Routledge, 1994. Even highly focused studies ofparticular communities, such as OLIVA, Marilyn. The Convent and the Communityin Late Medieval England, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1998, which examines inminute detail the functioning of eleven houses in the diocese of Norwich, havenothing to say about the delivery of medical care other than to note the existenceof occasional infirmaresses.
(32) St. AUGUSTINE, Rule for Nuns. In: George Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and HisMonastic Rule, Oxford, Clarendon, 1987, p. 115; my thanks to Elizabeth Clark forthis reference. Lawless argues that Augustine’s monastic rule was originally writtenfor monks and only later adapted (by Augustine himself?) for nuns. Masculineforms were systematically changed to feminine ones, so it is therefore notablethat medicus was not changed to medica even though the feminine form was in usein this period; cf. the Gynaecia of the contemporary North African writer, Theodorus
been a greater expectation of self-reliance and isolation of the nuns.Peter Abelard, writing to Heloise in the twelfth century, follows theprecepts of the Benedictine Rule in advising that the convent shouldhave an infirmarian and an infirmary stocked with all necessary medicamentsfor treating the sick. He advises in particular that «there should besome woman (in the nunnery) experienced in blood-letting, in orderthat it not be necessary for a man to come among the women for thispurpose» (33). Similarly, the Rule for the Poor Clares of Barcelonastipulates that
«the abbess should avoid and not allow the nuns normally to be bledmore than four times a year, if there is no particular need for more,and they should not be bled by any stranger, particularly by a man,whenever it is possible to avoid it» (34).
Just such a scenario can be seen in an illumination in a mid-fourteenth-century Diurnal (a book with prayers for the canonical hoursof the day) from the Cistercian house of Marienstern in Panschwitz-Kuckau, which depicts one nun being bled by another while a young
Priscianus. In: Valentin Rose, (ed.). Theodori Prisciani Euporiston Libri III ..., Leipzig,Teubner, 1894, esp. 233.1-11.
(33) ABELARD, Peter. Letter VII, in: T. P. McLaughlin. Abelard’s Rule for ReligiousWomen. Mediaeval Studies, 1956, 18, 241-292, at p. 261: «Oportet autem aliquamflebotomiae peritam esse ne virum propter hoc ad mulieres ingredi necesse sit.»Strictly enclosed English anchoresses were told by the author of the Ancrene Wissethat they needed to be bled four times a year or more often if needed, thoughthere is nothing in the guide to explain how this was to be accomplished; seeMILLET, Bella; WOGAN-BROWNE, Jocelyn. Medieval English Prose for Women:From the Katherine Group and «Ancrene Wisse», rev. ed., Oxford, Clarendon, 1992,pp. 140-141. Hildegard of Bingen, in her Cause et cure, lays out a detailed regimenfor bloodletting, scarification and cautery; see HILDEGARD of Bingen. On Natu-ral Philosophy and Medicine: Selections from «Cause et cure», trans. Margret Berger,Rochester, NY, D.S. Brewer, 1999, pp. 88-96.
(34) GONZÁLEZ I BETLINSKI, M.; RUBIÓ I RODÓN, A. La Regla de l’Ordre deSanta Clara de 1263. Un cas concret de la seva aplicació: el monastir de Pedralbesde Barcelona. Acta Historica et Archaeologica Medievalia, 1982, 3, 35; translatedfrom the Catalan by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, to whom I owe thanks forpermission to cite this.
343Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
girl holds the bowl to catch the blood (35). There is also some evidencefor other types of self-care within nunneries. The rigidly enclosed nunsof the isolated Cistercian convent of Coyroux in central France wereapparently expected to tend to their own ills, for they were handedmedicinal herbs through a gate every day along with the other provisionsbrought to them by the neighbouring monks of Obazine (36). To theextent that some religious women practised medicine outside theircommunities (which may have included some medical care provided athospitals their houses ran), they would at times have been responsiblefor aiding laypeople in their sufferings as well as themselves (37).
In theory, therefore, female religious institutions would have hadnumerous reasons for interesting themselves in medical books. Sincethese were the same institutions where female literacy levels would havebeen among the highest in medieval Europe, it is here that we wouldmost obviously expect to find a culture of literate medicine. Instead,however, in the catalogues, inventories, and other remains from femalereligious institutions we find the same marginal relation to medicalliterature that characterized female practitioners. Table 1 lists the seventeenwomen’s religious houses that I have thus far been able to documentowning medical books; as we saw above with the midwives, there seemsto be a notable difference between western and central Europe, a pointto which I shall return later. Even so, the total number is small, especiallyin light of the comprehensive studies of nuns’ books in various parts ofEurope that have appeared in recent years.
(35) OEXLE, Judith; BAUER, Markus; WINZELER, Marius. Zeit und Ewigkeit: 128 Tagein St Marienstern, Halle an der Saale, J. Stekovics, 1998, p. 248; there is also adepiction of a steambath. My thanks to Jeffrey Hamburger for bringing this studyto my attention.
(36) BARRIÉRE, Bernadette. The Cistercian Convent of Coyroux in the Twelfth andThirteenth Centuries. Gesta, 1992, 31, 76-82, at p. 80.
(37) Although there were many hospitals attached to female communities or run bytheir inmates, it should be remembered that the medieval hospitium was aninstitution more often providing charity for the needy (food, a bed) than medicalcare per se. POWER, note 31, is sceptical of English nuns’ medical practiceoutside the nunnery beyond care they may have given their own kin. My thanksto Walter Simons, who graciously shared with me sections from his forthcomingbook on the beguines where he surveys their charitable practices.
In his extensive study of extant manuscripts, booklists of or bequeststo medieval English nunneries, David N. Bell presents evidence of onlyone item of medical material: a late fifteenth-century collection ofdevotional texts that included a table of auspicious days for blood-letting and, on the fly-leaves, some medical recipes in English. Bellsuggests that this manuscript may have been owned in the early sixteenthcentury by a nun at the mixed Brigittine community of Syon Abbey,Elisabeth Crychley, but the evidence is questionable (38). The onlyother medical materials thus far identified in female institutions inEngland are a handful of recipes found in two manuscripts owned bythe house of Nunnaminster in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, andan herbal owned by Elizabeth Wellys who, in her will of 1520, requeststhat her book, which she had already lent to the Minories in London,should remain there for the nuns’ common use (39). Admittedly, theabsence of medical texts from English women’s houses may be moreapparent than real: there are no extant medieval catalogues from anyEnglish female institutions so we really have no idea of the full compassof books that may once have been housed in these nunneries. Indicationsare that at least some of these libraries were rather substantial, perhapsrunning into figures of 200 or more volumes (40).
If we compare the scanty English evidence with the Continent,however, it seems doubtful that the insular case is fundamentally anomalousor distorted. Again, we must recognize the incompleteness of our evidence,both because of lacunae in the surviving record and because of theinherent difficulties in assembling the material that does remain. Still,the few in-depth studies that have been done do not contradict the
(38) BELL, David N. What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries,Kalamazoo, Michigan, Cistercian Publications, 1995, pp. 180-181, referring toCambridge, Magdalene College, MS 13 (F.4.13). For skepticism about Crychley’sownership, see HAMEL, Christopher de. Syon Abbey: The Library of the BridgettineNuns and their Peregrinations after the Reformation, London, Roxburghe Club, 1991,p. 134. On the nuns’ books generally, see also HUTCHINSON, Ann M. What theNuns Read: Literary Evidence from the English Bridgettine House, Syon Abbey.Mediaeval Studies, 1995, 57, 205-222.
(39) See Table 1, items 1 and 2.(40) BELL, note 38, esp. pp. 42-43.
345Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
pattern we have started to see. Even well-endowed female communitieswhose book holdings are fully documented from medieval catalogueshave, at best, only a couple of medical books; more often they havenone. The libraries of Longchamp (Franciscan) and Maubuisson(Cistercian), both in France, and St Katharina (Dominican) in Nurembergare generally considered the three largest collections in female communitiesin the late Middle Ages, and for each of them we have medieval cata-logues. Clearly, these houses were not uninterested in the physicalhealth of their inmates. The Franciscan house of Longchamp, for example,had two infirmaries, both of which were repaired and renovated in1483, and we know by name two barber-surgeons who were nuns in thehouse. In the library, however, which had 227 volumes of works in Latinand French in 1481, not a single medical book is listed (41). A verseregimen of health was composed for the use of the abbess and nuns ofMaubuisson in 1286, but again no evidence survives to suggest that thehouse continued to own that text or any other medical works (42). OnlySt Katharina’s catalogue lists any medical texts—in this case, just twoout of some 500-600 volumes (43).
Even with only two medical books, however, St Katharina’s standsout from the great houses of Longchamp and Maubuisson, just as theother fourteen houses in German-speaking regions stand out from otherareas of Europe. Space does not permit a full-scale analysis of each ofthese houses. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that the medical textsthey owned point more towards idiosyncratic interests of the individualhouses (or even individual nuns) than to a pattern of engagement withmedical literature among German nuns generally. The few examples wehave of possession of medical books (most of which come from the very
(41) MºYNARCZYK, Gertrud. Ein Franziskanerinnenkloster im 15. Jahrhundert: Editionund Analyse von Besitzinventaren aus der Abtei Longchamp, Bonn, Ludwig Röhrscheid[Pariser Historische Studien, Band 23], 1987. On the barber-surgeons Jeanne deCrespi (d. 1349) and Macée de Chaulmont (d. 1489), see WICKERSHEIMER,Ernest. Dictionnaire biographique des médecins en France au Moyen Age, 2 vols., 1936;repr. Geneva, Librairie Droz, 1979, 2:505 and 532.
(42) COLLET, A. Traité d’Hygiène de Thomas le Bourguignon (1286). Romania, 1991(appeared 1994), 112, 450-87.
end of the medieval period) may suggest more about the availabilityand circulation of medical literature in German-speaking regions thananything particular about the institution of monasticism and femalelearning.
First of all, we need to put this number of houses into perspective.Sigrid Krämer’s monumental Handschriftenerbe des Deutschen Mittelaltersidentifies some 324 female houses in German-speaking areas (excludingAustria) from which manuscripts still survive; the fourteen German,Polish, and Swiss houses included here, therefore, constitute a merefour percent of that total (44). In fact, if we omit the three houses thathave only recipes scrawled into blank margins rather than systematicmedical texts (Table 1, items 5, 10, and 13), the number of housesowning full medical texts is reduced to eleven. To be sure, muchresearch remains to be done on women’s houses so we can hardlyaccept these current figures as definitive. Nevertheless, several recentcomprehensive studies of individual houses indicate that even large andwell-documented women’s houses had no medical books. It is thereforeunlikely that our difficulty in finding medical books in religious women’scollections is simply due to poorly-preserved evidence (45).
(44) My thanks to Florence Eliza Glaze for her scrupulous analysis of KRÄMER, Sigrid.Handschriftenerbe des Deutschen Mittelalters, 3 vols., Mittelalterliche BibliothekskatalogeDeutschlands und der Schweiz. Ergänzungsband I, Munich, Beck, 1989-1990. Krämernecessarily gives only the most minimal description of extant manuscripts’ contents;I have thus no doubt overlooked manuscripts with partial, imbedded medicalcontents. Caution must be used with this invaluable body of data because it is notalways clear that all the manuscripts were owned by the indicated houses in theMiddle Ages. A Latin and Middle English medical volume attributed to the femaleBenedictine house of Lamspringe, for example (Handscriftenerbe 2:473 re: Hildesheim,Stadtbibliothek MS 9), turns out to have been acquired by the house only in themid-17th century, when emigrant English monks were residing there.
(45) For example, the Benedictine convent of Frauenalb, which has recently beenstudied in great detail, yields no evidence of any medical materials in the fifteenthor sixteenth century; see HEINZER, Felix. Handschriften und Drucke des 15.und 16. Jahrhunderts aus der Benediktinerinnenabtei Frauenalb. Bibliothek undWissenschaft, 1986, 20, 93-124; the only text related to sickness is an Ordo advisitandum infirmum, i.e., a religious ritual (Heinzer, p. 105). Similarly, fifty-twomanuscripts are still extant from the house of Augustinian canonesses at Inzigkofen,
347Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
Secondly, we should be careful about assuming that theory-based,interventionist medical care was the most important commodity dispensedby the infirmaress or her assistants. Rather than functioning primarilyas clinics for acute care, let alone «hospitals» in the modern sense ofthe word, monastic infirmaries—male and female—seem to have servedlargely as hospices, places of rest and comfort for the chronically infirm,the aged, and the dying, and as a recovery room for inmates after theyhad had their routine bloodletting (46). The chief duty of the infirmarianwas less to diagnose and determine treatment than to tend to the basicphysical and spiritual needs of the sick. It is not surprising, therefore,that a recent study of male houses from the twelfth through the earlysixteenth century has shown that such books as were to be found inmonastic infirmaries were more likely to be liturgical than medical (47).
This seems to have been equally true of women’s houses. A mid-fifteenth-century German treatise by Johannes Meyer describing theduties of all the various officers of female Dominican houses portraysthe infirmaress (Siechmeisterin) as one who, among other things, is expectedto be knowledgeable about medicines; if not, she should turn to herfellow sisters for assistance. Undoubtedly Meyer expects that basic medicalcare would be offered, supported by herbs grown in the cloister gardenas well as the purchased medicaments we occasionally find listed inmonastic account books. There is, however, no specific injunction thatthe infirmaress should study medical theory or consult medical literature.The only books that are mentioned in connexion with the infirmary areworks to edify and console the sick (e.g., the lives of the desert fathersand texts on the art of dying well) (48).
which has likewise recently received intense scrutiny, yet it resembles the Englishhouse of Nunnaminster in having only a few brief recipes copied into the backof a book; see Table 1, item 10.
(46) See note 33.(47) NEBBIAI-DALLA GUARDA, Donatella. Les livres de l’infirmerie dans les monastères
médiévaux. Revue Mabillon, 1994, 66, 57-81. See below, however, regarding manuscriptsheld in the main libraries of male houses.
(48) MEYER, Johannes. Buch der Ämter, Bloomington, University of Indiana, LillyLibrary, MS Ricketts 198, which was the copy owned by St Katharina’s in Nuremberg.
The third fact we must keep in mind in evaluating the potentialimportance of medical literature to enclosed women’s houses is thepresence of specialist practitioners coming in from outside the community.In 1298, Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) issued his decretal Periculoso,which demanded that all religious women throughout western Christendombe strictly enclosed within their houses, not even leaving to carry outduties necessary for the functioning of their communities. (These wereto be handled by proctors and other male representatives.) Bonifaceequally restricted entry to women’s houses for all persons, «unless areasonable and obvious cause exists, for which the appropriate authoritymay grant a special license» (49). Legal commentators on Periculoso inthe following decades clarified that certain persons could be allowedinside without special permission: doctors, barbers, seamstresses, andcarpenters—that is, people whose skills were indispensable to the nuns (50).
Similar assumptions that attendance by professional (usually male)practitioners was normative in nunneries are found throughout Europe.Johannes Meyer’s above-mentioned guide for office-holders in Dominicanconvents was actually a German translation of a Latin text by Humbertof Romans. Humbert had written his guide for male houses; Meyer wastherefore not simply translating the language but also reinterpretingHumbert’s precepts for an audience of women. Meyer omits Humbert’swarning (reminiscent of Abelard’s) against bringing outsiders into themonastery, while he retains the injunction that the infirmaress’s assistant,together with the infirmaress herself, should pay heed to the physician’scounsel and advice (51). Further evidence for the regularity of employment
My thanks to Jeffrey Hamburger for bringing this important text to my attention andallowing me to make use of his film. Meyer also gave detailed instructions to thelibrarian on how the books should be catalogued; there is no reference tomedical books.
(49) BRUNDAGE, James A.; MAKOWSKI, Elizabeth M. Enclosure of Nuns: the Decre-tal Periculoso and its Commentators. Journal of Medieval History, 1994, 20, 143- 55,at p. 154.
(50) BRUNDAGE; MAKOWSKI, note 49, p. 148. See also MAKOWSKI, Elizabeth.Canon Law and Cloistered Women: ‘Periculoso’ and Its Commentators, 1298-1545, Was-hington, DC, Catholic University of America Press, 1997, pp. 47, 71, and 99.
(51) MS Ricketts 198, f. 55va: «vnd (die siechendienerin) sol mit den siechmeisterinmit fliss mercken der artzitten rat vnd vnderwisung vnd was die artzet heissen sind».
349Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
of professional lay physicians comes from the Cistercian house of Heilig-Kreuz near Braunschweig. An extant account book from the late fifteenthcentury and early sixteenth century shows that the Heilig-Kreuz nunsreadily availed themselves of the professional services of phisici. Moreover,this house seems to have served as a sort of medical mecca for nunsfrom nearby houses: because the major city of Braunschweig offered anarray of professional practitioners, nuns from more isolated houseswould come to Heilig-Kreuz for treatment of major illnesses (52). Infact, it is possible that some medical books associated with women’shouses may have been used not by the nuns themselves but by theseprofessional employees. A German-Latin medical volume may have beenproduced at (and possibly for) the female Cistercian abbey of Seligenthal,which had had a hospital associated with it since the thirteenth century.But that community itself is documented as employing lay physicians toattend to the medical needs of its nuns, and it is probable that thecompiler of the two original texts in the German-Latin volume (a cookbookand an Arzneibuch, both of which drew on excerpts from Hildegard ofBingen’s Latin Physica) was a man (53). When the manuscript laterpassed to the Brigittine double house of Maihingen, it may have beenused by the male monastics there (Table 1, item 14).
Structurally, there seems to be nothing about the situation of nunsin Germany that would have distinguished them from female monasticselsewhere in Europe in terms of their medical needs and practices. InEngland, although nothing has yet been found for a nunnery to rivalthe amazing parade of professional healers (including at least onewoman) who tended the monks at Westminster (54), it is likely that
(52) My thanks to Dr. Eva Schlotheuber of the University of Göttingen for this information(personal communication, 17 March 1999 and 13 September 1999).
(53) WEISS ADAMSON, Melitta. A Reevaluation of Saint Hildegard’s Physica in Lightof the Latest Manuscript Finds. In: Margaret R. Schleissner (ed.), ManuscriptSources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Essays, Garland Medieval Casebooks, NewYork, Garland, 1995, pp. 55-80, at p. 68, citing HIRTH, Wolfgang. Studien zu denGesundheitslehren des sogenannten «Secretum secretorum»: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigungder Prosaüberlieferungen, diss. Heidelberg, 1969. For other examples of male physiciansin German women’s houses, see STOUDT, note 20, p. 31.
(54) HARVEY, Barbara. Living and Dying in England, 1100-1540: The Monastic Experience,Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Bishop Peckham was not unusual when, writing in regard to BarkingAbbey in 1279, he said explicitly that it was permitted that male physicians(medici) as well as confessors have access to sick nuns (55). At Syon, theobligations of the infirmaress were chiefly nursing tasks—changing bedclothes, administering medicines, and applying plasters—all under thedirection of physicians from outside the house (56). Even hospitals forwomen employed male practitioners, such as that of St Mary de Pres inHertfordshire, a foundation for leprous women. Its accounts show apayment made to a barber in the mid-fourteenth century (57). Employmentof professional male practitioners was similarly normative among religioushouses of both sexes in Italy (58); the preference for professionalpractitioners was so strong that even Jewish male physicians wereemployed (59). A thirteenth-century Book of Hours made for a Belgianbeguine includes some brief health rules, but an accompanying illuminationteaches her iconographically that for medical diagnosis (and presumably,therapy) she must turn to a professional male practitioner (60).
Thus even in exclusively female institutions where there was almostalways an inmate specifically charged with tending the sick, recourse
(55) MARTIN, C. T. (ed.). The Register of Bishop Peckham, 3 vols., [Rolls Series 77], vol.1, p. 84; cf. vol. 2, p. 652 and 663, where he repeats this legitimate waiver of maleexclusion from the nuns’ rooms for Romsey and Wherwell.
(56) As cited in POWER, note 31, p. 134. NEBBIAI-DALLA GUARDA, note 47, notesthat this injunction that the infirmarian submit to the counsel of professionalphysicians was normative in monastic rules.
(57) Victoria History of the Counties of England, 4 vols., Hertfordshire, vol. 4, p. 430.Notably, at about the same time, the nuns there are ordered to improve theirliteracy, which had been deemed inadequate for their basic liturgical functions.Again, my thanks to Marilyn Oliva for this reference.
(58) PARK, Katharine. Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence, Princeton,Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 99-101.
(59) SHATZMILLER, Joseph. Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society, Berkeley, Universityof California Press, 1994, p. 95.
(60) OLIVER, Judith H. Gothic Manuscript Illumination in the Diocese of Liège (c. 1250-1330), 2 vols., Leuven, Uitgeverij Peeters, 1988, [Corpus of Illuminated Manuscriptsfrom the Low Countries, 3], vol. 1, p. 100; vol. 2, p. 246, 250-251, 285; and pl.15. Oliver suggests that health rules (which are simple month-by-month prescriptionsfor food consumption and phlebotomy) may have been a regular part of Booksof Hours that were later deleted.
351Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
was often made to professional practitioners coming in from outside.Why, then, do the German houses have even the few medical texts thatthey do? Such medical books as these communities had were for themost part limited to recipe collections and simple regimens—texts primarilyintended to help maintain health or treat minor disorders. They werenot substitutes for a physician’s care; least of all were they textbooks tolead the reader into the intricacies of philosophical medicine. Certainlythe most famous manuscript from a nunnery that incorporates a medicaltext is the so-called Guta-Sintram codex, a collection of liturgical andreligious texts written in 1154 by the Augustinian canoness Guta ofSchwarzenthann and illustrated by the canon Sintram from the brotherhouse of Marbach. Guta included a text on hygiene in the month-by-month Martyrology, and we can well imagine that the canonesses ofSchwarzenthann continued to remain aware of its precepts as theyinscribed new names in the accompanying list of the dead up throughthe fourteenth century (61). Yet while we might be able to credit Gutaherself with this innovation of adding the hygienic precepts to hercalendar, there is little else to suggest that a specifically feminine cultureof literate medicine developed within convent walls. The one medicaltext composed for a nun or community of women that I know of wasThomas le Bourguignon’s thirteenth-century tract on hygiene, whichwas also directed to a group of monks (62). Aside from Hildegard ofBingen’s work, only one medical text is known to have been composedby a nun and this is likewise a regimen; the German translation of thepseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum by the thirteenth-century Cisterciannun Hiltgart of Hürnheim. Although Hiltgart made her translation withthe support of her abbess and envisions both male and female readersof the book, it was prompted by the request of a monk and she in noway altered the masculine orientation of the Latin original (63). True,it may have had some local circulation in Cistercian convents (the
(61) See Table 1, item 3.(62) COLLET, note 42.(63) HILTGART von Hürnheim. Mittelhochdeutsche Prosaubersetzung des ‘Secretum secretorum’,
Reinhold Möller (ed.), Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters, 56 Ber- lin, Akademie-Verlag, 1963, p. 4: «Ich pit euch leser und leserinne/Das ir geleubig seit meinemkrancken sinne...».
convent of Seligenthal had a copy), and one would assume that a copyremained at Hiltgart’s own house of Zimmern. Similarly, it is quitelikely that a copy of Hildegard of Bingen’s medical writings remainedavailable at her convent at the Rupertsberg throughout the MiddleAges (64). Beyond that, however, there is as yet no evidence that femalereligious houses played a particularly notable role in the transmission ofthese female-authored works. While recent studies are confirming thatHildegard of Bingen’s medical writings had a more significant circulationthan previously assumed, all the known redactors or owners involvedwere male (65).
A closer look at the Dominican house of St Katharina’s in Nurembergcan give us some sense why this house had even the limited amount ofmedical material that it did. As we have seen, St Katharina’s had onlytwo medical books in its huge fifteenth-century library (66). The firstvolume listed in the catalogue had been in the house since before theDominican reformation of 1428, when the convent had only forty-sixbooks. This medical volume (which is still extant) includes a quitesubstantial collection of important and popular German texts: regimensof health, wound care, phlebotomy and bathing rules, Ortolf of Bayerland’sgeneral textbook of medicine, an herbal, and the highly popular collectionof recipes known as «Bartholomaeus». Although it has no specializedmaterial relating to women’s disorders (there is, in fact, nothing tosuggest that the volume was modified for female use), as a generalhandbook of information on herbs, bloodletting, and treatment ofwounds one can imagine that it would have served the infirmaress wellin her duties. In fact, this manuscript could quite accurately be calleda comprehensive compendium of all the leading German-language medical
(64) Table 1, item 4.(65) See MOULINIER, Laurence. Fragments inédits de la Physica: Contribution à
l’étude de la transmission des manuscrits scientifiques de Hildegarde de Bingen.Melanges de l’Ecole Francaise de Rome. Moyen Age, 1993, 105, 629- 650; and WEISSADAMSON, note 53.
(66) St Katharina’s was distinctive not only in having the largest library among femalehouses in Germany, but also in having the largest known library, personal orinstitutional, of German-language books.
353Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
material then available. The manuscript was produced in the Nurembergarea in the late fourteenth century and was bound at the male Dominicanhouse in the early fifteenth century; whether it was made expressly forthe women’s house is unclear, yet the fact that it came so quickly intothe nunnery’s holdings suggests that it might have been commissionedespecially for their use. If so, then this volume would clearly reflect aconcern to provide the infirmaress with a comprehensive body ofinformation comparable to that of a non-latinate general practitioner.
Rather than serving as the core of a larger collection of materials toeducate the infirmaress or other members of the community, however,it is likely that this volume was meant only to be a medical referencebook. The acquisition of the second volume at St Katharina’s seems tohave been fortuitous rather than deliberate. The first half of this compositecodex was a general practica, arranged in head-to-toe order, which hadbeen given to the convent by a certain Peter Kraft. The latter half wasa collection of recipes that had been owned by one of the nuns, KunigundeGross Schreiberin, a patrician widow who brought a total of nineteenbooks into the convent with her (67).
Altogether, then, St Katharina’s owned three medical books, animpressive collection, to be sure, in comparison with the scant evidencewe have for other nuns’ involvement with medical literature. But it wasnothing more substantial than a basic household collection (68). Andthat, of course, is the point: even this, perhaps the wealthiest femalecommunity in Europe in terms of its number of books and intellectualresources, invested almost nothing in acquiring medical literature nor,we may imagine, in cultivating an environment in which medical educationcould be enriched. It should be remembered that the library at StKatharina’s increased more than tenfold in less than fifty years following
(67) SCHNEIDER, Karin. Die Bibliothek des Katharinenklosters in Nürnberg und diestädtliche Gesellschaft. In: Bernd Moeller, et al. (eds.), Studien zum städtischenBildungswesen des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit: Bericht über Kolloquien derKommission zur Erforschung der Kultur des Spätmittelalters, 1978 bis 1981, Göttingen,Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983, pp. 70-82.
(68) In my survey of lay women book owners, I have found two women who owned sixmedical books and three who owned five. The majority (71%) have only one.
the reformation of 1428, to a large extent because of the copying effortsof the nuns themselves (69). Aside from the effort of binding Kraft’spractica with Schreiberin’s recipe collection, none of the massive laborsof the nuns to build up the library collection was directed towardproducing medical texts.
This continuing (self-?) perception of religious women as being«lay» in respect to a corps of professional medical personnel outside thenunnery seems to have been paralleled in respect to the nuns’ attitudetoward legal learning. The grouping of law and medical texts togetherin the fifteenth- century catalogue of St Katharina’s reflects the perceptionof the two fields as related, presumably in their technical, non-religiouscharacter. As with the medical texts, the two legal texts at St Katharina’shave different provenances. One, a copy of «papal law» (pebstlichen recht)was given to the convent by a priest, while the other, a copy of theSchwabenspiegel, was brought into the house by Sister Katharina Tucherin,a patrician widow (like Kunigunde Schreiberin) who gave a total oftwenty-four volumes to the house (70). The law books and the secondof the two medical books at St Katharina’s thus reflect the interests orconcerns not of the community of nuns, but of their individual priestly(male) and aristocratic (female) donors. The similar provenance of theone medical and the one legal book that had been privately owned bywomen before they were brought into the house suggests, moreover, thesimilarity of law and medicine as areas where land-owning and relativelypowerful women may in certain situations have felt they needed some
(69) EHRENSCHWENDTER, Marie-Luise. A Library Collected by and for the Use ofNuns: St Catherine’s Convent, Nuremberg. In: Lesley Smith and Jane H. M.Taylor (eds.), Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, London andToronto, British Library and University of Toronto Press, 1996, pp. 123-132.
(70) SCHNEIDER, note 67, pp. 70-82. Tucherin’s copy of the Schwabenspiegel is stillextant (Nürnberg, Stadtbibliothek, MS Cent. IV, 93). With over 380 knownmanuscripts, the Schwabenspiegel was the most widely circulating German text inthe later Middle Ages.
(71) I have found only two other cases where women owned both medical books andlaw books: (1) Jeanne de Chalon, countess of Tonnerre (d. 1360), who ownedamong her twenty books «ung livre en françois de plus[ieurs] medicinnes» and«un livre en françois des loys de Bertaingne»; and (2) Elisabeth von Volkensdorf,
355Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
reference material (71). Clearly, the religious community of St Katharina’sas whole felt no similar need, for as with medicine, despite the massivebuild-up of the library in the course of the fifteenth century, no legalbooks were produced within the nunnery itself.
The example of St Katharina’s seems to suggest, then, that theliterate milieu of the nunnery did not automatically encourage anattitude of medical self-sufficiency such that the acquisition of advancedmedical literature was deemed necessary or desirable. We may attributethis to a highly developed «culture of suffering» which valorized anascetic acceptance of pain and disease as an imitation of Christ (72). Orwe may attribute it to the fact that religious women seem to havereplicated the lay culture from which they had come—one which wasalready accustomed to turning to professional practitioners when facedwith serious illness. Or, perhaps more simply, we may see the lack ofengagement with formal, theoretical medical literature as a reflectionof the same non-intellectualism characteristic of women’s monasticismgenerally. It is now well-documented that certain female houses (manyof them in German territories) became loci for distinctive creative endeavors:the composition of mystical treatises, the writing of collective biographiesand institutional histories, even the creation of distinctive forms ofdevotional art (73). That no similar creativity seems to have been directedtoward medical education or composition may say more about thesuccessful masculinization of philosophical medicine than about theskills or interests of the nuns themselves.
a fifteenth-century Austrian woman, whose forty-eight volume collection comprisedsix medical books as well as two rechtpuech. No biographical information onElisabeth has been found, but the very wealth of her book collection makes itlikely that she would have been of similar social standing as the Countess Jeanneand the patrician women of St Katharina’s. For citations, see GREEN, note 2, pp.52 and 54.
(72) STOUDT, note 20.(73) See, for example, LEWIS, Gertrud Jaron. By Women, For Women, About Women: The
Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of MedievalStudies, 1996; HAMBURGER, Jeffrey. Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of aMedieval Convent, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.
(74) Will of Pere Torres, 7 July 1458, as cited by FERRER GIMENO, Maria Rosario.Mujeres y libros en Valencia (1416-1474). Estudis castellonencs, 1994-95, 6, 515-523,at p. 521. My thanks to Montserrat Cabré i Pairet for this reference.
3. CONCLUSIONS AND SPECULATIONS: THE ROLE OF GENDER
At the most fundamental level, we can identify the limited educationof girls and women as the common cause of the similar distance of bothpractitioners and nuns from theoretical medical literature. Basic literacy—the ability to make out words, to read over and over again the samedevotions or prayers, even the ability to teach rudimentary letters toone’s children—offered no automatic entrée into the world of technicalliteracy which medicine necessarily involves. Whereas urban girls mayhave occasionally received some formal schooling, except in a few rarecases they were not allowed to receive the secondary education thatwould have given them training in grammar, logic and dialectic. Thisdifferential, in turn, may have proved the crucial dividing line in keepingwomen’s literacy below the level where they could readily engage withtechnical literature. And as the ability to engage with medical theory(which was symbolized, of course, by the knowledge embodied in books)came more and more to define what constituted «learned» medicalpractice, the image of «the medical professional» would more and morebe equated with masculine gender. In fifteenth-century Valencia, anapothecary wills all his movable goods to his wife except «the things andtools that I have of my apothecary’s art, and the books that I have of thisart» (74). The books, just as much as the tools, are part of the capitalinvestment of his profession. But they also symbolize his intellectualinvestment and, no doubt, serve as a continuing symbol of his status asa professional. The will does not specify whether his professional possessionsare to be sold or given to another practitioner. Yet the very fact that hedraws such an absolute separation between household and craft/professionsuggests that his wife played no role in the latter.
The exclusion of girls from higher learning would have had asimilar effect on the women who became nuns. In the same years thatthe nuns of St Katharina’s in Nuremberg were building up theirextraordinary library, the physician Hermann Schedel (1410-1485), also
357Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
(75) STAUBER, Richard. Die Schedelsche Bibliothek: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Ausbreitungder italienischen Renaissance, des deutschen Humanismus und der medizinischen Literatur,[Studien und Darstellungen aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte, VI, 2 and 3],Freiburg im Breisgau, 1908. RUF, Paul (ed.). Mittelalterliche BibliothekskatalogeDeutschlands und der Schweiz, vol. 3, part 3, 1939; [repr. Munich, C. H. Beck,1969], pp. 798-844. SCHNELL, Bernhard. Schedel, Hermann. In: RUH et al., note16, vol. 8, pp. 621-625. SCHNELL, Bernhard. Arzt und Literat: Zum Anteil derÄrzte am spätmittelalterlichen Literaturbetrieb. Sudhoffs Archiv, 1991, 75 (no. 1),44-57.
of Nuremberg, was building up his own private collection. Schedel wasa humanist who had studied in Leipzig and Padua and served as physicianto Kurfürsten Friedrich III of Brandenburg and later as municipalphysician in Nuremberg. He counted the leading families of Nurembergamong his clientele (including, for example, the family of KatharinaTucherin), and both male and female monastics numbered among hispatients. His library comprised 667 volumes, approximately a sixth ofwhich were medical books, the vast majority in Latin (75). Schedel canno more be considered typical of male medical practitioners than therich house of St Katharina’s can be considered typical of all women’sreligious houses. But each library in its excess suggests something aboutexpectations of learning for professional male practitioners, on the onehand, and pious cloistered women, on the other.
That the libraries of pious cloistered men more often resembled thelayman Schedel’s library than that of the nuns of St Katharina’s showshow firmly the gender divide was fixed. As noted above, even in men’shouses medical books were not commonly found in the infirmaries. Butin the general libraries of many of the larger male houses, we can oftenfind dozens of medical books. From St Augustine’s in Canterbury to theCistercian Abbey of Clairvaux, the libraries of male monastic communitiesoften rival the medical holdings of both private practitioners and universitieswhere medicine was taught. Even in Nuremberg this gendered divisionis obvious. The male Dominicans had a library comparable in size tothat of their sister house, but it was almost entirely in Latin. Theircatalogue listed nine medical volumes, which comprised approximatelyseventy different texts (including one entitled «On the Diseases ofWomen» and a copy of pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s «On the Secrets of
(76) RUF, Paul et al.(ed.), Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz,4 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1918-1983), vol. 3, pp. 495-496. A tenth volume had asingle medical text amid works on astronomy. The copy of the pseudo-Albertantext is still extant: Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 673 (Irm. 917).
(77) RUF, note 76, pp. 761-762.(78) SCHNELL, Bernhard. Die volkssprachliche Medizinliteratur des Mittelalters -
Wissen für wen? In: Thomas Kock and Rita Schlusemann (eds.), Laienlektüre undBuchmarkt im späten Mittelalter, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 1997, pp. 129-145,has pointed out that not all monks who owned medical books were «lay» withrespect to medicine. Be that as it may, I believe that male monastic medicalcollections (many of which were composed of books given to the houses) reflectmore the «research» needs of these communities of intellectuals rather than theimmediate therapeutic needs of active practitioners.
(79) See, for example, ZIEGLER, Joseph. Ut Dicunt Medici: Medical Knowledge andTheological Debates in the Second Half of the Thirteenth Century. Bulletin of theHistory of Medicine, 1999, 73, 208-237, for the frequency and command with whichnon-physicians employed medical arguments in their work.
Women») (76). Similarly, the male Franciscans had ten medical volumes,comprising twenty-one major texts in Latin (77). Whether these sizableholdings served to edify the monks and friars for purposes of medicalpractice is unclear; they no doubt relied to some extent (perhaps to agreat extent) on the services of lay professionals in the same way thewomen did (78). But here is the crucial difference: these primarilylatinate medical works could serve to bring the male Dominicans andFranciscans of Nuremberg into the same intellectual universe that universitymen, whether clerical or lay, participated in throughout Europe (79).
Even in mixed communities of men and women it is doubtful thatwomen were ever invited into these broader dialogues about the natureof the elements, the workings of the body, the causes of disease. Forexample, even without the existence of the catalogue of the nuns’collection at the Brigittine community of Syon Abbey in England, it isobvious that the men’s collection (for which we do have a catalogue)differed radically from the women’s. Whereas the men of the housewere intimately involved in external affairs (both ecclesiastical andpolitical), using their phenomenal library resources (their collectioncomprised at least 1500 volumes) to run what has been called a veritable«spiritual university,» the nuns were decidedly not noted for their intellectual
359Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
(80) DE HAMEL, note 38, pp. 99-100. For the catalogue of the men’s library, seeBATESON, Mary. Catalogue of the Library of Syon Monastery, Isleworth, Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 1898.
(81) HUTCHINSON, note 38.(82) Extant from the men’s collection of medical books is Glasgow, University Library,
MS Hunter 509 (s. xv), a Middle English translation of Gilbertus Anglicus’sCompendium medicine. Two others were in English, while the rest were in Latin.
(83) Sister PATRICIA, O.SS.S. The Growth and Expansion of the Order. In: JamesHogg (ed.), Studies in St Birgitta and the Brigittine Order, 2 vols., Lewiston, NY,Edwin Mellen Press, 1993, pp. 27-48, at pp. 28-29. Several of the extant Elbingmanuscripts are clearly of university origin; see ROBINSON, P. R. Catalogue ofDated and Datable Manuscripts c. 737-1600 in Cambridge Libraries, 2 vols., Cambridge,D. S. Brewer, 1988, vol. 1, pp. 61-63.
activity; instead, they engaged in constant prayer (80). Although severalnuns (at least in the early sixteenth century) had good command ofLatin, their studies—whether in Latin or English—seem to have beensolely devotional (81). Given these striking differences between the activitiesof the nuns and the monks, it is hard to imagine that the nuns everowned anything comparable to the twenty-nine medical volumes thatthe men had or even, given the strict physical segregation of the monksand nuns (their libraries were, in fact, separate and they never saw eachother, not even in chapel), to imagine any regular sharing of medicaltexts between the men and women (82). It is thus also worthy of notethat the female house I have here documented with the largest collectionof medical texts (in Latin, no less) is the community of Elbing beiDanzig (i.e., Elblag near Gdansk in modern-day Poland, Table 1, item8) which, like Syon, was a mixed Brigittine community of monks andnuns. Little is known about this community or its library, but given thepatterns we have seen for other medieval women’s medical book hol-dings, it would be extraordinary indeed if these three technical Latinbooks turned out to be owned by the nuns of Elbing (who, in the earlyyears of the house’s history, were all ex-prostitutes) rather than themonks (83).
My emphasis in this paper has been to focus on the evidence forwomen’s engagement with medical literature and we have come to therather unsurprising conclusion that, Hildegard of Bingen aside, medie-
val women apparently never enjoyed the same access to formal medicalliterature—and the knowledge embodied in it—that the men who inhabiteduniversity and peri-university circles did. Nor is there yet any evidencefor an alternative written tradition that circulated within femalecommunities, let alone any tradition that focused specifically on women’sdiseases. (Not a single women’s house is found to be in possession ofany specific gynaecological literature beyond a couple of recipes andcharms.) Yet these silences themselves raise important questions, for ifwe look just beyond the end of the medieval period, we find a surprisingefflorescence of female-authored medical literature (84). These collectionsseem to owe more to empirical traditions of recipe-collecting than toany medieval tradition of book-learning in the medical sciences. Thesecollections suggest, moreover, that perhaps we need to look beyond thewritten word and search for medical knowledge that existed in theunstable realm between writing and orality. Perhaps it is here, ratherthan in medical books, that we will find the sources of medical educationof medieval women.
(84) See GREEN, note 2, pp. 46-48; and the 16th-century Arzneibuch of the nun AnnaMaria Stöcklin listed in Table 1, item 11, below.
361Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
1) the nuns may havecopied several OldEnglish medicalremedies into abook containingprivate devotions inLatin and variousprayers
2) A religious andcomputisticalcompendium,composed in theearly 11th centuryfor a male reci-pient, had a singlemedical recipe inOld English addedshortly after itscomposition; themanuscriptprobably passedinto the hands ofa woman in thetwelfth century,perhaps an abbessat Nunnaminster
in her will, ElizabethWellys requests thatan herbal she hadalready loaned to theMinories shouldremain there for thenuns’ common use
TABLE 1
Female Religious Institutions Owning Medical Books
Note: This list includes all books with medical content that I have thus far found in theholdings of female religious institutions. My researches have included published materialfor Catalonia, France, the Low Countries, Italy, and Majorca, though aside from the last nocomprehensive studies of these regions have yet been published.a I would welcome receivingnotice of newly-discovered material or published studies that have escaped my notice.
ENGLAND
Institution
[1] Benedictinehouse of StMary’sNunnaminster,Winchester
Institution Medical Books Total Number Typec and Dateof Booksb of Source
[3] Augustiniancanonesses ofSchwarzenthann
[4] Benedictinehouse ofRupertsberg
[5] Dominicannuns in theRhine areaj
[6] Dominicanconvent ofSt. Marien inLemgo
written by thecanoness Guta in1154, a liturgicalmanuscript includes aseries of hygienicprecepts as part of itsMartyrology; themanuscript remainedin the possession ofthe house until atleast the 14th century
Johannes Trithemius,abbot of the nearbyabbey of Sponheim,visited Rupertsberg inthe 15th century, andreports having seencopies of both ofHildegard of Bingen’smedical writings; it ispossible that thesewere the originalcopies that had beenproduced atRupertsberg duringHildegard’s lifetime(1098-1187)
Owned a psalter intowhich was added anexorcism for thediseased uterus
owned a collection oftexts in Latin andLow German onplague, phlebotomy,charms, herbs, andcare for the dead
1/??
2/??
1/??
1/5
M/1154h
O/ca.1487-96i
M/13th cent.k
M/14th-16thcent.1
363Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
Institution Medical Books Total Number Typec and Dateof Booksb of Source
[9] Dominicanconvent of StKatharina’s inNuremberg
two medicalmanuscripts are listedin its 15th- cent.catalogue:
1) a collection (stillextant) of Germantexts, including aRegimen sanitatis,portions of Ortolfof Bayerland’sArzneibuch, theso-called Macertext on herbs, andBartholomaeus’Arzneibuch; this isone of the 46books that hadbeen in thecollection sincebefore theDominicanReformation of1428
2) a general practica,arranged in head-to-toe order,followed bygeneral remedies;this codex hadoriginally beentwo separatevolumes: thepractica was thegift of Peter Kraft;the recipecollection wasbrought to thecloister by one ofthe sisters
1/46
2/ca. 500-600
M(an. 1398) +C/1455-61º
C/1455-61P
365Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
Institution Medical Books Total Number Typec and Dateof Booksb of Source
[10] Augustiniancanonesses ofInzigkofen
[11] Cistercianabbey ofSeligenthalin Landshut,which had ahospitalassociatedwith it since1252
owned a two-volumebook of Gospels andEpistles, into which alater hand wrote threemedical recipes, (on,respectively, jaundice,rheumatism, andmenstrual irregularity)
three manuscripts ofmedical contentproduced in the 15thand 16th cent. Seemto be connected withthis house:
1) a copy of Hiltgartvon Hürnheim’sGerman transla-tion of thepseudo-AristotelianSecretum secretorumr
2) a fifteenth-centuryGerman and Latinvolume with textson materia medica,cooking, horsemedicine, andointments andplasters may havebeen producedhere; portions ofthe text oncooking and theArzneibuch derivefrom Hildegard ofBingen’s Physica
3) Anna MariaStöcklin, a memberof the convent inthe 16th cent., wasowner (and perhapscompiler)of anArzneibuch, acollection ofmiscellaneousrecipes (some ofwhich derive frommale physicians)
owned a 15th-centurycopy of “Magister Bartho-lomaeus,” a popular Ger-man medical compen-dium that had beencomposed ca. 1200
owned a manuscript ofMiddle Dutch devotio-nal texts which includes,at the end, three medi-cal recipes
at some point acquiredthe manuscript that mayhave been produced atSeligenthal (item 11above) that containedGerman and Latin textson materia medica, co-oking, horse medicine,and ointments andplasters
in 1496, the nunMagdalena Haslingermade up a list ofmanuscripts, 36German and 18 Latin;among the German
1/67
1/51
1/23
2/54
M/late 16thcent.s
M/15th cent.t
M/2nd half of15th cent.u
M/late? 15thcent.v
C/1496W
367Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
Institution Medical Books Total Number Typec and Dateof Booksb of Source
[16] Franciscantertiaries atWonnenstein
[17] Dominicanconvent ofAltenhohau
manuscripts were twomedical books (einpuch von der Ertzneyand mer ein püech derErtzney)
owned “a little bookof medicine” (ainklins artzatbüchly)
a list of expenses in1513 for booksmentions a German“medical book calledThe True Art ofDistilling” (“einerczney puch genantder waren kunst zudistilieren”) which hadjust been acquired bythe convent
1/ca. 200?
1/ca. 44
C/s. 15ex./16 in.x
O/1513Y
NOTES
a. As opposed to other areas of Europe, Majorca has been the subject of anexhaustive analysis of all its medieval bookowners: see HILLGARTH, Jocelyn N. Readersand Books in Majorca, 1229-1550, 2 vols., Paris, Éditions du Centre National de laRecherche Scientifique, 1991, who finds two instances of books owned by nuns. Inneither case are these medical. For France, the only national survey thus far publishedis GENEVOIS, Anne-Marie; GENEST, Jean François; CHALANDON, Anne (eds.). Bibliothèquesde manuscrits médiévaux en France: Relevé des inventaires du VIIIe au XVIIIe siècle, Paris,Éditions du C.N.R.S., 1987.
b. The first figure is the total number of medical books, the second the totalnumber of books in the institution’s library (to the extent that that number can bedetermined).
c. C = medieval catalogue of the nunnery’s library; B = bequest to the house insomeone’s will; M = extant manuscript; O = other type of list or reference.
d. The nuns may even be responsible for having creatively adapted these recipesfrom previously existing Old English medical books. HOLLIS, Stephanie; WRIGHT,
Michael J. The Remedies in British Library MS Cotton Galba A.xiv, fos 139 and 136r.Notes and Queries, 1994, 239 (n.s. 41), no. 2, 146-47. This manuscript also contains aprose charm for curing foot ailments (f. 72r), and two recipes for restoring the bodyto health through prayer (f. 118rv); see HOLLIS, Stephanie; WRIGHT, Michael (withthe assistance of MILLS, Gwynneth M. D.; PEDDER, Adrienne). Old English Prose ofSecular Learning, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, [Annotated Bibliographies of Old and MiddleEnglish Literature, 4], 1992, p. 288. On the books owned by Nunnaminster in the 11thand 12th centuries generally, see MORROW, Mary Jane. The Literary Culture of EnglishBenedictine Nuns, c. 1000-1250, Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1999, esp. pp. 197-202.
e. See HOLLIS and WRIGHT(1992), note d, pp. 236 and 238, re: London, BritishLibrary, MS Cotton Titus D.xxvi.
f. As cited from Guildhall Library, MS 9171/9, ff. 175r-176r in PAXTON, Catherine.The Nunneries of London and Its Environs in the Later Middle Ages, Ph.D. dissertation,Lincoln College, Oxford, 1992, p. 106. My thanks to Marilyn Oliva for this citation.
g. Includes all German-speaking regions, including Poland and Austria.h. WEISS, Béatrice, et al. (eds.). Le codex Guta-Sintram, manuscrit 37 de la Bibliothèque
du Grand Séminaire de Strasbourg, 2 vols., Lucerne, Éditions fac-similés; Strasbourg,Éditions Coprur, 1983.
i. Trithemii Opera historica, [ed. FREHER], Frankfurt, 1601, as cited in SCHRADER,Marianna; FÜHRKÖTTER, Adelgundis. Die Echtheit des Schrifttums der hl. Hildegard vonBingen, Cologne and Graz, Böhlau, 1956, pp. 54-58.
j. Although the specific house is not known, the manuscript can be situated in theRhine area because of its liturgical contents.
k. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, MS 146.2 Extravagantes (s. xiii med.);the charm, added by a later thirteenth-century hand, appears on f. 2r. See KRUSE,Britta-Juliane. Verborgene Heilkünste: Geschichte der Frauenmedizin im Spätmittelalter , Quellenund Forschungen zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, 5, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter,1996, p. 440; and BUTZMANN, Hans. Die mittelalterlichen Handschriften der GruppenExtravagantes, Novi und Novissimi, Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1972,pp. 83-84.
l. Detmold, Nordrhein-Westfälisches Staatsarchiv, MS L 110 B Tit. 3 Nr. 3; describedin GERLACH, Friedrich. Aus mittelalterlichen Klosterbüchereien und Archiven, Lemgo, 1934,pp. 10-17. According to Gerlach (p. 11, n. 2), the as-yet-unpublished medieval booklistof St Marien listed libri medicinales, suggesting that there may have been more than onevolume. Cf. KRÄMER, Sigrid. Handschriftenerbe des Deutschen Mittelalters, 3 vols., MittelalterlicheBibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz. Ergänzungsband I, Munich, Beck, 1989-1990, vol. 2, p. 489.
m. Karlsruhe, Landesbibliothek, MSS Lichtent. 31 and 76. See ETTLINGER, Emil.Die Ursprüngliche Herkunft der Handschriften die aus Kloster-, Bischöflichen undRitterschaftsbibliotheken nach Karlsruhe gelangt sind, rev. ed., Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz,1974, pp. 10-11; and KRÄMER, note l, vol. 1, pp. 48-50.
n. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MSS 505, 516, and 530; though not strictlymedical, there is also in MS 521 a collection of religious texts that ends with a brief listof the signs of pestilence. See KRÄMER, note l, vol. 1, pp. 202-203.
369Book as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages
o. The manuscript is now Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M. ch. f. 79, an. 1398;for description, see THURN, Hans. Die Handschriften der Zisterzienserabtei Ebrach, DieHandschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg, Bd. 1, Wiesbaden, Harrossowitz, 1970,pp. 95-98. For the catalog, see RUF, Paul et al. Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlandsund der Schweiz, 4 vols., Munich, Beck, 1918-1983, vol. 3/3, p. 618.
p. RUF et al., note o, vol. 3/3, p. 618.q. FECHTER, Werner. Deutsche Handschriften des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts aus der
Bibliothek des ehemaligen Augustinerchorfrauenstifts Inzigkofen, Sigmaringen, J. Thorbecke,1997, pp. 74-76; my thanks to William Crossgrove and Bernhard Schnell for bringingthis study to my attention.
r. Hürnheim (where Hiltgart produced her translation) and Seligenthal had thesame abbot as their superior; see HILTGART von Hürnheim, MittelhochdeutscheProsaübersetzung des «Secretum secretorum», ed. Reinhold Möller, Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters,56, Berlin, Akademie-Verlag, 1963, p. xxv.
s. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 288; and Augsburg, Universitätsbibliothek,MS III. 1. 2º 43. On the latter manuscript, see WEISS ADAMSON, Melitta. A Reevaluationof Saint Hildegard’s Physica in Light of the Latest Manuscript Finds. In: MargaretSchleissner (ed.), Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Essays, GarlandMedieval Casebooks, New York and London, Garland, 1995, pp. 55-80, esp. pp. 67-70.In none of these excerpts is Hildegard cited by name. The third manuscript is Bethesda(Maryland), National Library of Medicine, MS 68: «Arzeney Buech warinen villunterschidlich guete Hausmitl zo finden», ff. 1r-90r. For a description of the manuscript,see FAYE, C. U.; BOND, W. H. Supplement to the Census of Medieval and RenaissanceManuscripts in the United States and Canada, New York, Bibliographical Society of America,1962, p. 143.
t. Darmstadt, Landesbibliothek, MS 2507; see KRÄMER, note l, vol. 2, p. 456. Onthe Bartholomäus text, see KEIL, Gundolf. Bartholomaeus. In: Kurt Ruh (generaleditor), Die deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed., in progress,Berlin/New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1978- , vol. 1, p. 609-615.
u. Ebstorf MS VI 10, f. 143r. See GIERMANN, Renate; HÄRTEL, Helmar. Handschriftendes Klosters Ebstorf, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1994, pp. 180-82.
v. Augsburg, Universitätsbibliothek, MS III. 1. 2º 43. See KRÄMER, note l, vol. 2,pp. 523-524.
w. Archivhandschrift Nonnberg, 14 A II A 1, ff. 14r-v. My deepest thanks to DrGerold Hayer of the University of Salzburg for this information, and to Dr BernhardSchnell of the Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch in Göttingen for his intercession.
x. RUF et al., note o, vol. 1, p. 454; there are no surviving manuscripts fromWonnenstein so it is impossible to know what this «little book of medicine» was. Mythanks to David N. Bell for bringing this citation to my attention.
y. RUF et al., note o, vol. 4/2, p. 604. The book in question may be HieronymusBraunschweig’s printed volume, Das Buch der waren Kunst zu distillieren die Composita(1507). Aside from a collection of rituals for sick and deceased nuns (Munich, BayerischeStaatsbibliothek, Clm 23313-23319), no books relating to medicine seem to be extantfrom Altenhohau.
